~ This blog will be an attempt to explain the significance of various works of great writing, the authors that create them, and some effort to understand correlations between great writing and contemporary events.

I try my best not to “plug” materials, movements, or programs on this site, largely because I’m a self-obsessed loser who requires constant external validation and so when somebody else steals focus my initial reaction is to freak out. Still, another one of my personal idiosyncrasies is doing my absolute best to support my friends and make their work known in any and all way that I can. I don’t have much in this life, but I do have this blog and so I wanted to talk about the podcast The Atomic Library.

My friends Christina Chaney and Lara Tabri have begun a podcast about the Orson Welles Public library in the town of Haven-Hollow following the Apocalypse. The podcast is a radio-drama that follows the protagonist of Hazel and Margery, as well as the city Librarian, Reference Librarian, Youth services librarian, and the rest of staff which includes a precocious temp-employee and a pompous archivist who may or may not have been lossely (heavily) inspired by yours truly. The Atomic Library is hysterical at every-turn and an oddly and bizzarly accurate depiction of day-to-day library operations even if it involves a populace dealing with the implosion of society and nuclear armagedon.

The podcast is also unique for being a reverse-Shakespeare performance in that literally every cast member is played by a woman

This podcast is a delight, and I say this with no hesitation whatsoever, that I will drop whatever I’m doing the moment a new episode drops. So please, if you have even just a few minutes, check out this wonderful podcast my friends have worked so hard in producing. Library matter, and the people who work to make them great put everything they have into ensuring that patrons leave satisfied. Lara and Chris have made something wonderful and the reader is sure to agree with me.

I mean…I stand by the fact that G.I. Joe was always gay.Those boots.Those uniforms.The shaved head.Those pictures of him wearing panties on his Instagram.The evidence was there people, we need to acknowledge it and move forward.On a separate but unrelated note I’ve now been working for a Public Library for close to two years now and it is without doubt one of the greatest things that’s ever happened to me.I’m surrounded by people who care about me, everyday I have a sense of purpose and direction, and it’s largely because of all this positivity that I’ve begun to seek professional help for my depression.However, despite all of this there remains one fixture of my life that remains in some form of stasis and that is my desire to provide some kind of gift to the LGBTQ community of my home-town.

It’s becoming more and more difficult to justify the purchases of books in my library, and not just because of the space issue.I’m arriving at a condition in life when I’ve come to the pathetic and despairing realization that I’m never going to read all of the books that I’ve ever bought, not because I’ve suddenly contracted a terminal illness, but because every time I think how I’m about to have completed every book in my library, another author that I appreciate will publish another book, or else the library will put out the latest batch of purchases which might include a book about the making of 2001: A Space Odyssey or else the presence of dictatorships in the plays of William Shakespeare.There’s just no way to keep up with the near constant generation of content by all the writers, poets, video-game designers, directors, musicians, biographers, and playwrights that are constantly generating new and increasingly dynamic art.And now that I’ve elected to make libraries a significant facet of my existence that only means more books to read.

The most recent addition to my personal library managed to combine both of these delightful problems.

I have the habit of simply spending hour after hour searching through the endless labyrinth that is book recommendations on GoodReads.It’s cute sometimes watching the algorithm try its best to figure me out, but after just a few books it gives up offering me lists rather than individual books.Because of this I have to rely on my own initiative and so I simply typed in LGBTQ into the search bar and looked through the results.Shit you not, cannot lie, the tenth book in the queue was Out Behind the Desk: Workplace Issues for LGBTQ Librarians.

Spring isn’t the right word, I fucking leapt to my library’s home web-page to submit an ILL request, and not long after the book finally arrived I decided to hit “fuck-it” and just purchase it on Amazon.I’ll admit some part of me wanted it simply to show off to my other Queer co-workers, but if I can defend myself against the barbs of my reader’s judgement, I really and truly wanted to read the book because, since I started working for the Library, I wanted to learn more and more about how Queer people tend to operate in it.

Out Behind the Desk is a collection of essays, all of them personal, about being gay, being a lesbian, being Trans, being bisexual, or just being queer and working in a library.These essays are attempts to understand how the library can be queered by the sheer presence of LGBTQ people, but far more often than not the testimonies of this book are about navigating the social and political sentiments of coworkers and patrons.In one of the later essays, Pride and Paranoia @ Your Library, Maria T. Accardi relates a personal narrative that, when I read it, I recognized it because it’s a moment I’ve lived at least twice in my tenure at my own library.She says,

In my library, we have a display area on which the collection development librarian, exhibits books from our collection.[…]. I scoured our catalog for books on my chosen topic.I traveled through the stacks with a book cart and removed books from the shelves, and I also ordered some books I thought we should have in our collection but did not.I arranged the books on the display shelves in a manner I found aesthetically pleasing, and I created a colorful sign to announce the display was active, while working my shifts at the reference desk, I watched patrons walk by the display, and I would hold my breath.I would see people stop and look at the books, and read the sign, and pick up the books, and page through them and read the back covers, and my heart would pound.I braced myself for complaints.I rehearsed conversations in my head, defending the contents of the library display.(205)

Beside this passage in my paperback copy of the book is a simple sentence: “My Life.”This isn’t coyness on my part, I live this moment almost every day at the library, and especially during the month of June I can sympathize with the paranoia and feeling that one must be ready for critics.Accardi continues her point, explaining her anticipationand paranoia.

So why was this display so fraught with anxiety for me?It was a display in honor of GLBT Pride Month.(205).

Cue the dramatic pipe organ music, and the crusty Old British guy in the arm chair holding the red-leather-bound book as he looks up and growls, “THE GAYS.”I believe a lightning strike is supposed to follow this, and the sounds of horses screaming.There’s also sometimes a lavish musical number culminating in the all Men’s dance troupe of Dallas and I just realized that that in itself, might be construed as, well, kinda gay.

It might not make much sense to the reader who doesn’t work in a library, or a school for that matter, but broaching the topic, or even just drawing attention to the LGBTQ community is not just fraught with consequence, it can be, to quote the immortal Shakespeare, “a goddamn mine field.”I think that quote came from Twelfth Night, or maybe Othello.

Because many libraries are usually public institutions, and therefore an extension of the government or at least communal and civic spaces, they are subject to whims and sentiments of the patrons that patronize them.That’s all just a way of saying that libraries are ultimately subject to the court of public opinion, and unfortunately the public has a tendency to be freaked out by anything and everything gay.

Except of course for Ru Paul, that man’s a national treasure.

Or Laverne Cox, she’s radiant.

Looking at this paranoia as a reader however I identified with Accardi, not just because I’ve set up numerous displays during my tenure as a Reference Associate at my library, but because I’m a queer Reference Associate at my library.Setting displays to celebrate the Queer community is not anything like a display for Mental Health Awareness month, or a display to commemorate the life and career of Tobias Wolfe, it’s far more personal.And Accardi briefly notes that in her essay:

A rejection of a display of GLBT books is not just a rejection of an expression and diversity—it is a rejection of me, as a person, the actual fact of my existence.(206).

Having conversations about identity politics is often the stuff of nightmares largely because there is always the anticipation that one person is going to find the other person ridiculous for their integrity.If someone becomes passionate rather quickly about something, at least in my experience, the tone of the room changes dramatically, and what was supposed to be a sweet bridal shower for Carol has become a conversation about how Jill Stein could have beaten Donald Trump in the general election, meanwhile the rest of us are desperately trying to determine the exact radius of the earth on our iPhones because we’d rather be literally anywhere else.It’s easy to shut down and try to pretend that a person’s passion is something ridiculous but ultimately that does someone a disservice.Accardi’sargument is a valid one, because ultimately a complaint about a display in a library is not just about the actual display, it’s about the idea that that display represents.Ultimately a library display isn’t just a display, it’s a combination of resources about an intellectual or cultural concept, and when that display is about the lives, careers, and history of Queer people asking or demanding the library to take it down because it offends you is tantamount to saying you’d rather not have to acknowledge the existence of queer people, or else you’re a shit-head who doesn’t want to admit queer people even exist.

The reader may be wondering however what the real relevance is to themselves.I’m not queer so why should I care if a library has to take down a display celebrating Pride month?What do I care if one or two people complain and force a library to take down a display I didn’t even notice or care about?What’s the real problem with that?

The problem dear reader is exactly what Accardi pointed out and what Nicola Price suggests in their contribution to Out Behind the Desk, Taking the Homosexual Highroad.Price writes about working in a government library and therefore having to be silent about their own political opinions.They write:

Spending five days a week in the closet makes it harder to express my true self when I’m with friends or in the comfort of my own home, because a semi closeted life begins to feel normal, and therefore somewhat comfortable.(240.)

There were lots of moments while reading this collection that I found myself quietly nodding, or else boldly underlining passage after passage because the words were either thoughts I recognized, or sentences that I have said aloud.Being a queer man in a public library in East Texas can be difficult because I have to navigate how “out” I actually am.I go to work everyday wearing a large, round, noticeable rainbow button on my lanyard.It was supposed to be a small button to go between my “Tiny Rick” and my “Platform 9 3/4” pins, but when it arrived in the mail I discovered it was massive.It’s there, on my chest, like a great, big, wonderful, fabulous target.I’m sure people see it and they notice it, and while I’ve yet to have anyone comment on it directly it’s my subtle means of being “out.”

But there are moments in which I have to “tone it down.”Recently a patron approached the Reference Desk to complain about two books in our “new book section.”One was about a book about President Trump, and the other was about a book I had only just finished reading entitled David Bowie Made me Gay.He had much to say about the Donald Trump book but when he got to David Bowie he just made a sound in throat like a low wretch and shook his head.I wanted so desperately to say something, make a quip about a boyfriend I didn’t actually have, or come-out right then and there and observe his reaction taking some kind of solace in his further disgust.But that isn’t my job, and so I politely informed the patron that there is an official “challenge” form that we have in case patrons find materials “questionable.”He grumbled away leaving me to question whether or not I had caved or missed my chance to “fight the power.”

My job, my life, it seems is a constant struggle to determine how “out” I should actuallybe, andhow I am supposed to balance my personal and professional queer self.And Out Behind the Desk only gave me more questions to ask.

In The Secret Life of Bis: On Not Quite Being Out and Not Quite Fitting In, BWS Johnson asks a few questions near the end of their essay, and they’re questions worth asking.

In appealing to the mainstream, are we burying too much of our values?In doing so, are we missing a service opportunity?Do we have to add the Lambda to our out of the scope collection?(120).

They continue this point noting:

While I’m on that, does anyone else feel that sinking stomach when we come to the realization that our place on the shelves is between deviates and the masochists?[…]

I suppose the inevitable anti-conclusion I’m coming to is this: the further I get from my own narrative, the closer I come to saying that there is much work to be done collectively.The harder the writing gets, I find myself able to make fewer statements.As the sands of our history shift with rulings like Lawrence v. Texas and actions like the Vermont Legislature’s, and we’re delighted by pictures of gay couples getting hitched, what are we doing in parallel within the field?How are we building our house?How is it that we can best continue, including those on the down low, as well as those that are out and proud?Where do we go from here?(120).

These are all questions that I ask everyday when I go to work, and when I find myself away from the reference desk with a spare moment to think.I’m often working on some new catalog of items that haven’t been touched in decades and that occupies my time,but over and over again I’m thinking about what I could be doing for the queer patrons at the library.I think about the projects I would like to work on, questioning myself immediately about whether they would attract any actual people, or whether or not they would and be shut down because of one random person’s complaint.

This is all just a way of saying that often my experience as a library employee is wondering how “out” I’m supposed to be, how “out” I’m allowed to be.And while this probably speaks more to my own perceptions, the very existence of Out Behind the Desk reveals that I am not the only library employee or librarian who has this problem.

By now the reader may have their challenge ready, or perhaps I’m being pessimistic.Perhaps the reader may see where I’m coming from and for once actually not have a criticism or complaint.

Libraries matter because they aren’t necessarily “safe spaces,” but they are a unique structure and place where ideas and opinions and records can be collected for the culture’s that build and fill them.Libraries are about storing and providing access to information, and therefore when libraries cannot provide materials to Queer individuals in society for fear of repercussions then they are actively being subverted by a portion of humanity that would rather have it so that Queer people didn’t exist in the first place.It might just be a display of biographies about famous drag queens, or lesbian singers, or famous Trans political activists, but when librarians have to worry about whether or not such a display should go up in the first place then there is a problem.

Libraries are always going to inspire emotions, conflicts, and heated debates about what constitutes “questionable material,” but a library should be one of the spaces where that conversation takes place.If a patron doesn’t wish to check out a book, read it, and enterinto the conversation about the history and culture of the Queer community they can always walk past the display and pick up the newest Danielle Steel novel and go about their life.But the freedom to pick up a book by Kate Bernstein or Allison Bechdel or Tom of Finland should still be an option.

And as queer librarians and queer library employees there’s more than just paranoia and discomfort at stake.Not fighting to ensure that queer people have such resources, have such access, and have such programs at their disposal is more than just validating one’s existence.

Libraries are ultimately places and spaces where people can come and acquire information, hopefully, without fear.But before I spend too much time waxing philosophical I should remind the reader why this is personal for me.

Libraries have saved my life because my library has in many ways always been my life.I fell in love with libraries as a kid, spending hours just reading all the books I could get my hand on, spending time with my Mom in the library, and now that I’ve grown and become an employee there I’ve flourished, finding people and librarians who love what they do and who want to make the library a better place.At the end of the day I serve a largely straight population, but if I can make sure that there’s always a copy of Fun Home or Me Talk Pretty One Day then it’s my library too.

Queer people have as much to give a library as any other person in our society, and like everyone who walks through the front doors of such a place looking for a book, a queer person enters that space hoping to find something, some resource that reminds them that they are not alone.

Out Behind the Desk can at times be a dry academic affair, but the strength of the book is the honesty of the writers who go to work everyday because they love books, because they love hosting programs, because they love shelving, because they love compiling and archiving data.And of course there’s some solace in knowing that I’m not the only person who’s discovered a shelf desecrated and left a mess literally minutes after I spent a good half hour straightening everything.

*Writer’s Note*

All quotes cited from Out Behind the Desk were taken from the paperback Library Juice Press Edition.

**Writer’s Note**

If the reader is at all interested in more literature about being Queer in the library I’ve provided a link to a few articles below.Please enjoy:

I’ve written a lot here, but I really want this to come across and I’ll write it plainly, I simply love being gay. I love being queer. I love love love love LOVE my sexuality, and my gender identity, and that I work in a place that loves and accepts me for who I am. I hate that it took so long to get where I am, to get to my level of comfort, or at least closure with my sexuality, but now that I’m here no one is going to force me back into the closet. I’m a fabulous gay library employee, and I’m not going anywhere.

We get it, my reader says before I start. Libraries matter, let’s move on to something else. Like when are you going to start that multi-part review of The Sandman Series? And why isn’t there a review of Lolita yet? You keep talking about Christopher Hitchens’s book god is Not Great and yet you haven’t written to B—– to discuss why that book is so flippin important. And why why why haven’t you sat down yet and written your review of The Martian Chronicles, A Contract With God, Middlesex, and the second half of Gay Macho? Huh? Tell me that?

Well before I begin I probably should say it’s unusual to object to my reader before I’ve even started, but kudos for demonstrating initiative. And for the record all of these arguments have great merit. There is a large pile of books to my left which haunts me daily because it’s a reminder that I haven’t been writing many reviews lately. You see the last six months have entailed me realizing that I don’t want to be a teacher (I had one semester and it just about broke me), a long period of nervous break-downs which almost cumulated in a suicide attempt, a deep and profound existential crisis, a return to editing a novel I wrote when I was 19 years old, and the sudden appearance of a job at the library which, if I can be dramatic, has literally saved my life and inspired me to live life and actually enjoy myself.

That’s a long way of saying I apologize to your initial rebuttal, but libraries really do matter. But not simply because working at one kept me from shooting myself.

My wife tells me I need to stop saying things like that. Sorry wife.

I’ve written over the last few months about what social function libraries play in society and culture, and what libraries have meant to me personally. Ever since I was a kid I loved going to the library and disappearing into books and being in a nice quiet place where I could read, and now that I work at one (I’m technically not a librarian because I don’t have an MLS degree, I’m an Information Access Associate) I realize that the library remains a vital hub for the community and for literacy. Because I’ve covered so much ground already of what libraries can mean, it may seem pointless to discuss it any further. However, a book like Library: An Unquiet History comes along and adds a new dimension I hadn’t really considered while I was wandering through my romanticisms.

I bought the book while I was still teaching a college class. A few of my friends worked at the library, and so I began scrolling through books on Amazon about libraries (their history, their theory, their social function) working out some unconscious desire on my end to join them in that happy space. The book had good reviews, and a fair number of the people writing said reviews had nothing but good things to say and so I plucked it up. I wish I had a better intro story about this book, but that’s what it is. My mind was looking to escape into the idea of the library to save itself from my current reality and I guess it worked, eventually.

Matthew Battles, the author, is a fellow at the Berkamn Center of Harvard University where he also worked as a librarian. His initial experience is a beautiful lesson which, I’m sad/happy to say, I’m repeating myself:

When I first went to work in Harvard’s Widener Library, I immediately made my first mistake: I tried to read the books. (3)

The reason for this mistake is the fact that, as he explains later, contemporary human beings armed with processors, blogs, texts, tweets, online messages, and, of course, actual published books produce more written material in a day than has existed in the entire collected history of human beings. The problem then facing a librarian is: what do we keep? This question yields to a far more important question: what exactly is the role of a library, and what is the philosophy that governs it? These aren’t simple questions because a quick analysis yields to problems.

I’ll run a quick hypothetical:

Do you only keep religious writing, and then how do you define religious? Would you include materials written by Atheists or Muslims or Hindus? If the answer is no, and you decide to only service Christian writing how do you define Christianity? Do you include a Joel Olsteen beside the writings of St. Augustine? And if you decide to only keep work published by a particular denomination of Christianity how do you define your library because at that point you’re almost certainly not a public institution, nor are you really an academic one?

These questions are ultimately like a hydra’s head for the moment one is answered new ones spring up and so Battles’s book manages to chronicle how humans have shaped the idea of the library to fit the various models.

He continues in his introduction saying:

Each sort of library is also an argument about the nature of books, distilling their social, cultural, and mystical functions. And what the Word means to society—whether it is the breath of God or the Muses, the domicile beauty and the good, the howling winds of commerce, or some ambiguous amalgam of all these things—that is what the library enshrines. (9).

This is the end of the Romantic history and Philosophy for my review because I’ve covered this idea in previous essays and reviews. Battles’s book is first a history of libraries around the world, and through his narration he manages to demonstrate how libraries lie at the philosophic and historical heart of societies, and for this reason they have tended to suffer for it. In fact, let’s be clear, sometimes the library been outright abused for its very existence.

Battles begins with the famous tale about the burning of the Library of Alexandria. The tale goes that a Muslim conqueror by the name of Amr, heading the will of a Caliph Omar, burned the library of Alexandria and the thousands of scrolls contained there because these writings did not reveal the nature of god and were nothing but pagan trash. As such the library was destroyed. This is a story I had heard before, on numerous occasions, even once in Reading Lolita in Tehran, and so I was rather surprised when Battles points out that this story is rooted mostly in folklore. He writes:

When Julius Caesar came to the aid of Cleopatra in her war against young Ptolemy III in 48 B.C. (by which time the libraries were already nearly three hundred years old), he burned the ships in Alexandria’s harbor to prevent his enemy from taking the city by sea. According to Seneca, some forty thousand books were lost in the ensuing conflagration, though other authorities hold that only a few books, stored in the warehouses awaiting shelving, were burned. (23-4).

I’m tempted here to raise my first and shout, “Damn Damn Damn Damn, Damn You Rex Harrison!” But I doubt many people would get that I’m making a My Fair Lady reference and a Cleopatra reference at the same time, so instead I’ll just note that in typical fashion that Julius Caesar remains a dope.

Battles does an excellent job in his book of correcting numerous stories like this, explaining the early history of libraries, how the concept of private and public libraries developed to prominence during the Renaissance and later Neo-Classical period, how Dewey established the Dewey decimal system and created the “ideal” of the library that currently exists, and finally ends with the rise of industrialization and how the mass production of books created new implications for libraries in general. And all of this, it should be noted, is written in readable language. Rather than taking a theoretical or “academic” approach Battles’s aim is always to simply educate the reader and tell the story of how libraries have changed and altered over the course of their existence, while also highlighting how the society that entertains them and establishes them comes to think of them. It may seem strange to observe that, but the way a society views libraries matters a great deal to how they operate.

My title alone suggests this. Despite the flag-waving, and calls for liberty that takes place within the United States, one of the most consistent public battles is literacy, specifically what should the populace be literate about. Topics like global climate change, the history of slavery and abuse of native Americans, queer identity, and evolution are consistently viewed as suspect and certain powers object to books relating to this topic existing at all in the library. And of course there’s Nazis, but more importantly, Jim Crow laws.

Battles at one point discusses the history of Nazi Germany and the book burnings that take place there, but honestly one of the most horrific stories told in Battles’s book is not the atrocities of Nazi’s, but in fact libraries in the United States.

Battles’s writes,

Destroying a library, however, is merely the crudest form of editorializing. Libraries left intact can become tools of oppression and genocide, too, since they offer canons that reflect the conceits of mystical nationalism and the will to purity. As Richard Wright relates in what is perhaps the climactic scene in Black Boy, his wrenching autobiography, libraries in the Jim Crow South not only deemed some books off-limits; they supported the notion that some people were unsuited to be readers. If the new library offered great progressive hope, so could it deliver unbearable pain in withholding that hope. (180).

This is a side of libraries that most people, particularly in this country, probably would like to ignore, or else pretend didn’t exist. And because of this impulse I find it’s far more important to discuss it than what took place in Nazi Germany. Growing up I remember reading The Diary of Anne Frank, and being told stories of World War II, and learning of the Holocaust and the travesties of book burnings, but growing up I never really learned much about the real travesties facing African Americans. I learned about slavery, I read some books about Jim Crow, but no one had ever taught me about the fact that even libraries could deny people access to books. It seems ridiculous now that such a practice would be allowed to exists, especially in a country that prizes freedom of the individual above everything else, but this idea of open literacy is one that has been noted before.

In his memoir, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Douglass relates how the mistress of the plantation that he worked taught him to read and write. The scene has become iconic in its own right, and the passage remains one of the most powerful portions in the book, for amidst the physical pains slaves were expected to suffer through, Douglass notes how powerful was the punishment of illiteracy. His master discovered these lessons and noted:

“Now,” said he, “If you teach that nigger (speaking of myself) how to read, there would be no keeping him. It would forever unfit him to be a slave. He would at once become unmanageable, and of no value to his master. As to himself, it could do him no good, but a great deal of harm. It would make him discontented and unhappy.” These words sank deep into my heart, stirred up sentiments within that lay slumbering, and called into existence an entirely new train of thought. It was a new and special revelation, explaining dark and mysterious things, with which my youthful understanding had struggled, but struggled in vain. I now understood what had been to me a most perplexing difficulty—to wit, the white man’s power to enslave the black man. (338).

Reading this passage, I was reminded of the episode of The Simpsons when Lisa explains to Homer why intelligence is making him sad. She simply says, “As intelligent increases, happiness tends to decrease.” This same idea was expressed in an episode of SpongeBob where Patrick’s head is accidently replaced with brain coral and he becomes hyper-intelligent. While these are both cartoon examples they still feel terribly relevant as I look over Battles’s book, and this small passage from Douglass’s memoir. Moving past the cartoon reality towards our own the lesson does remain valid. Reading regularly makes one aware of the world and how it operates. It’s unfortunate but true that when one educates oneself, one begins to learn that people in society can cruel, apathetic, and lazy in general. That knowledge can sometimes make one feel isolated, and isolation is one of the roads to depression.

Battles’s doesn’t exactly help as he points out further:

Black colleges often had made their library resources available to the community, and they sometimes trained librarians for public library service. But even in those states most amply furnished with libraries, public accommodations of blacks was nearly nonexistent. George for instance, had fifty-three libraries in 1936, only five of which served blacks; out of forty-four public libraries in Florida, blacks could use four. (183).

My reader may at this point wonder why they should bother with the book. If it’s nothing but a long history of the terrible things that have happened through libraries, along with the history of how libraries have grown and changed over time, why they should they care? This is an age of e-books, blogs, facebook, twitter, and reality television. What relevance does a library have?

This is a fair point, especially given the fact that I’m writing for a blog. My writings here will almost certainly never appear in print, so how or why should somebody care about a library?

To this question I answer, from my own experience working in a library, that even if society is moving to a paperless milieu, that society will still require some means of organizing, compiling, and arranging those materials in such a way so that the common public can access them. And Battles himself argues such:

The bibliographer of the digital age returns to the revelatory practice of her medieval forebears. Librarains, like those scribes of the Middle Ages, do not merely keep and classify texts; they create them, too, in the form of online finding aids, CD-ROM concordances, and other electronic texts, not to mention paper study guides and published bibliographies. Digital texts have followed the same deeply grooved arc of other forms of writing. […] Already we call our databases and online catalogs “digital objects”—a reflection, perhaps, of our nostalgia for the dusty physicality of our books[…]. (211)

Rather than leave the reader with some sentiment about the idea that books will last forever, or that there will always be some kind of physical record, my lasting impression of Battles’s book was the idea that libraries exist to ensure there is a space where human beings find information. The library is not just a dusty building full of books, but as Battles’s books demonstrates it’s a highly political space where the negative actions of human society, whether it be war, genocide, racism, sexism, classicism, etc. can all, and very quickly, usurp the space polluting the original idea of what that space was supposed to be.

And, if I can play with the abstract a little bit here, Battles’s book is a highly readable history about the idea of what libraries actually were. What were their focus, how did technology change their approach to collecting and gathering information, how did power and economics influence these decisions, how have they survived and protected information in the face of political and physical violence towards their space, and finally how do the people who subscribe to the idea of the library try to defend and shape that space to their own ideals?

Library: An Unquiet History may sound at first like an abstract, academic book but that’s only because I’m a shit writer who gets wrapped up in his own head when he writes. This book was good, damn good reading, because even people who couldn’t give three diddly fucks about the history of libraries could come away from the reading with a bounty of information and something to give a passing shit about. In an age when we have to defend the very existence of the libraries themselves it speaks to the power of a book, and its writer, that it could pull off such a miracle.

*Writer’s Note*

All quotes from Library: An Unquiet History comes from the paperback W.W. Norton Edition. All quotes from Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass comes from the Signet paperback copy of The Classic Slaves Narratives edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

It’s not just because I want to work at a library. It’s because I hate Neil Gaiman. I hate the man because he is everything that I want to be. Not just an accomplished author with a few books under my belt, but a writer who has really altered the creative landscape for being nothing else but what they truly are. An author who creates, not simply for creation, good creation, is never simple it just looks like it, but an author who creates purely in their own style so that it is impossible to picture it presented any other way. Gaiman is a writer who, no matter what he is doing, always manages to make the work his own.

I should stop kissing ass and actually get to the library essay. Speech actually.

I try once a week to have coffee with one of my friends who hasn’t left Tyler yet and just talk about everything and anything and these coffee dates have become a weekly series I refer to as “Coffee with Jammer.” I’m currently in talks with PBS about turning this into a series but they keep telling me there isn’t enough gratuitous nudity or shit blowing up. That and Charlie Rose is starting to call me and leave threatening messages. I keep this standing appointment because, even though I do consider myself an introvert and am often far happier sitting at home reading my books and writing these essays, social interaction is important. Keeps the voices at bay. Talking with my friends, who will deny it vociferously, I find they are often far more intelligent than me and they often have interesting things to talk about which in turn inspires new ideas for the work I produce for White Tower Musings, so you might also say that there is some selfishness on my part.

Still the most recent “Coffee with Jammer,” which was interrupted only three times by Mr. Rose’s violent text messages, took place with my fellow gentleman scholar Seth Wilson who actually has contributed an article for WTM. The coffee was lovely, and between the jokes about “Roll a D20” and “Alan Moore’s hilarious/tragic psychosis” we managed to talk a great deal about Stranger Things and writing in general. When we parted I decided to hang back and look around because “Coffee with Jammer” always takes place at the local Barnes & Noble and so after the long conversations where I’m usually intellectually stimulated I try to calm down by looking at the books. This unusually backfires because I wind becoming more and more excited by all the new books and old books and books period, and while I was passing by one table I literally swung on one foot and looked down.

The name Neil Gaiman is always enough to capture my attention because he has a consistent track record of reminding me that he’s not just talented but exceptional. With books like Sandman, Coraline, American Gods, The Tragical comedy or Comical Tragedy of Mr. Punch, and The Graveyard Book Gaiman isn’t just a writer that you read and then drop his books back beside the can. His books have a real soul and power that just so completely absorbs you that it’s impossible to simply put them down. The book on the table wasn’t even all that eye catching. It was just Gaiman sitting in the back of a movie theater. In script that mimicked old abandoned typewriters it read The View from the Cheap Seats.

The title didn’t catch me as much as the subtitle: Selected Nonfiction.

Over the last two years I’ve found myself reading more and more nonfiction and, because I’m finding myself comfortable with the title of essayist, I’ve been trying to see what others have done with the form. This wasn’t enough to sell me on the book though, it was when I opened it and read the title of the first work in the collection that I snapped it shut and headed for the cashier.

Why Our Future Depends on Libraries, Reading and Daydreaming: The Reading Agency Lecture, 2013 has rather long title and so I’ll just shorten it to Why Our Future Depends on Libraries. I’ve mentioned it at the start but to say it once again I’ve recently begun to realize that I would like to work in a library. While part of this is just some childish romanticism thanks to The Pagemaster, the realist in me has begun to read books about libraries, watch TED talks from librarians, and actually dig into firsthand testimony by librarians about what the job entails, and after all this research I still want to work at one. Libraries are not simply book depositories and long shelves full of dusty books tended to by sexless grandmothers and men who wear sweater vests. They are in fact real cultural hubs where communities can find free and available resources for everything and anything.

This was part of the appeal of reading Gaiman’s essay, but by the end some of that romanticism I cautioned myself against had come back, and in my defense it’s difficult to avoid this when the man writes passages like the following:

The simplest way to make sure that we raise literate children is to teach them to read, and to show them that reading is a pleasurable activity. And that means, at its simplest, finding books that they enjoy, giving them access to those books, and letting them read them.

I don’t think there is such a thing as a bad book for children. Every now and again it becomes fashionable among some adults to point at a subset of children’s books, a genre, perhaps, or an author, and to declare them bad books, books that children should be stopped from reading. I’ve seen it happen over and over; Enid Blyton was declared a bad author, so was RL Stine, so were dozens of others. Comics have been decried as fostering illiteracy.

It’s tosh. It’s snobbery and it’s foolishness. (7).

I’ve never read or watched a speech delivered by a real person that actually made me cry. The only actual speeches that have brought me to tears were those delivered by President Bartlet on West Wing, and let’s be fair here that man had the benefit of pre-cocaine Aaron Sorkin to help him out. I can honestly admit without shame however that Why Our Future Depends on Libraries had me in tears by the end because it reminded me what words can actually do. Words and ideas can summon emotions, memories, feelings, passions, and dreams that have long been left buried in our hearts either because they were inconvenient, or else because we were afraid to simply speak them out or write them down lest be perceived as a fool. My emotional reaction to Gaiman’s beautiful speech is not the important idea that’s worth exploring here, although a bit of my past may help to offer some insight.

When I was a child my mother would regularly take me to the Library because every Saturday was “Book time” when one of the librarians would sit before a clustering of children and read out loud a randomly selected book, or books, to the kids, and once this activity was done there would be fun exercises involving coloring or drawing, but often what would occur is that the kids would scatter to the nearby shelves, pull out a book, sit in the big fluffy couches, and disappear into their selected paper-back tomes. I still remember the sensation of trailing my finger over the spines of books reading the titles until I found something I wanted. I remember the George and Martha, Frog & Toad, Jumanji, The Teacher from the Black Lagoon, Where the Wild Things Are, but mostly I remember a book called Bootsy Barker Bites. I must have checked this book out at least thirty times but it didn’t matter how many times I read this book I couldn’t get enough of it. Those Saturdays at the Library when I would gather whole piles of books to read at home, or have my Mom or Dad read them to me, remain so much a part of who I eventually became.

The Library fostered in me the idea that reading wasn’t just something you had to do for school, it could be fun. Once that idea was established, reading and books in general became more than just assignments, they became to learn more about other people as well as myself, and while I did have a brief period where my reading slagged off a bit, I never lost the idea that reading was an important skill not just for individual amusement, but also for the larger issue of citizenship.

Gaiman’s speech is not political in the sense of partisanship; it is only political in the fact that it declares it’s sentiments openly and without regard for criticism. Later on in the speech he exerts why he stands on the position that he does:

According to a recent study by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, England is the “only country where the oldest age group has higher proficiency in both literacy and numeracy than the youngest group, after other factors, such as gender, socio-economic backgrounds and type of occupations are taken into account.”

Or to put it another way, our children and our grandchildren are less literate and less numerate than we are. They are less able to navigate the world, to understand it to solve problems. They can be more easily lied to and misled, will be less able to change the world in which they find themselves, be less employable. All of these things. And as a country, England will fall behind other developed nations because it will lack a skilled workforce. And while politicians blame the other party for these results, the truth is, we need to teach our children to read and enjoy reading.

We need libraries. We need books. We need literature citizens.

I do not care—I do not believe it matters—whether these books are paper or digital, whether you are reading a scroll or scrolling on a screen. The content is the important thing.

But a book is also content, and that’s important.

Books are the way that we communicate with the dead. The way that we learn lessons from those who are no longer with us, that humanity has built on itself, progressed, made knowledge incremental rather than something that has to be relearned, over and over. There are tales that are older than most countries, tales that have long outlasted the cultures and the buildings in which they were first told.

I think we have responsibilities to the future. Responsibilities and obligations to children, to the adults those children will become, to the world they will find themselves inhabiting. All of us – as readers, as writers, as citizens: we have obligations. I thought I’d try and spell out some of these obligations here. (12-3).

The idea that literacy matters to a republic is not novel, but it’s still a vital idea nevertheless, and one that I try to impart to students and friends who often admit freely that they don’t care about politics. I understand the sentiment completely when it is expressed, and given the current political climate it’s any wonder that the people who care about politics are able to still find something worth talking about at this point, but after the flash and pop of the superficial campaigns and the passionate shit-storm that is discussing President Obama at Thanksgiving, politics is something vital and important and literacy is at the heart of that idea. Governments can only rule by the consent of the governed, but if the citizenry of a republic cannot even read the law for themselves then how can they make an informed decision about whether to support said laws or the politicians writing them. I recognize that I run the risk of sounding like a first year political science student who’s just read Common Sense for the first time, but I hope the reader is able to look past this.

Libraries are at the core of the idea that a democracy can only work if everyone, regardless of race, religion, class, or ethnicity can have access to reading and writing and thus offer up their own voice. Gaiman offers a more eloquent explanation than I could in a rather long quote. He talks at first about being a young man who was often “left” at a library, which for the record parents shouldn’t do because librarians are not babysitters, but it was because of these librarians that he was able to discover the importance of literacy.

They were good librarians. They liked books and they liked the books being read. They taught me how to order books from other libraries on inter-library loans. They had no snobbery about anything I read. They just seemed to like that there was this wide-eyed little boy who loved to read, and would talk to me about the books I was reading, they would find me other books in a series, they would help. They treated me as another reader – nothing less or more – which meant they treated me with respect. I was not used to being treated with respect as an eight-year-old.

Libraries are about freedom. Freedom to read, freedom of ideas, freedom of communication. They are about education (which is not a process that finishes the day we leave school or university), about entertainment, about making safe spaces, and about access to information.

I worry that here in the twenty-first century people misunderstand what libraries are and the purpose of them. If you perceive a library as a shelf of books, it may seem antiquated or outdated in a world in which most, but not all, books in print exist digitally. But that is to fundamentally miss the point.

I think it has to do with nature of information.

Information has value, and the right information has enormous value. For all of human history, we have lived in a time of information scarcity, and having the needed information was always important, and always worth something: when to plant crops, where to find things, maps and histories and stories – they were always good for a meal and company. Information was a valuable thing, and those who had it or could obtain it could charge for that service.

In the last few years, we’ve moved from an information-scarce economy to one driven by an information glut. According to Eric Schmidt of Google, every two days now the human race creates as much information as we did from the dawn of civilization until 2003. That’s about five exobytes of data a day, for those of you keeping score. The challenge becomes, not finding that scarce plant growing in the desert, but finding a specific plant growing in a jungle. We are going to need help navigating that information to find the thing we actually need.

Libraries are places that people go to for information. Books are only the tip of the information iceberg: they are there, and libraries can provide you freely and legally with books. More children are borrowing books from libraries than ever before – books of all kinds: paper and digital and audio. But libraries are also, for example, places that people, who may not have computers, who may not have internet connections, can go online without paying anything: hugely important when the way you find out about jobs, apply for jobs or apply for benefits is increasingly migrating exclusively online. Librarians can help these people navigate that world.

I do not believe that all books will or should migrate onto screens: as Douglas Adams once pointed out to me, more than 20 years before the Kindle turned up, a physical book is like a shark. Sharks are old: there were sharks in the ocean before the dinosaurs. And the reason there are still sharks around is that sharks are better at being sharks than anything else is. Physical books are tough, hard to destroy, bath-resistant, solar-operated, feel good in your hand: they are good at being books, and there will always be a place for them. They belong in libraries, just as libraries have already become places you can go to get access to ebooks, and audiobooks and DVDs and web content. A library is a place that is a repository of information and gives every citizen equal access to it. That includes health information. And mental health information. It’s a community space. It’s a place of safety, a haven from the world. It’s a place with librarians in it. What the libraries of the future will be like is something we should be imagining now. Literacy is more important than ever it was, in this world of text and email, a world of written information. We need to read and write, we need global citizens who can read comfortably, comprehend what they are reading, understand nuance, and make themselves understood. (9-11).

We’re living in a different age than our fathers and mothers. A former professor of mine would remark to us that we had no idea how easy our jobs as students were. In the past, and he admitted this freely, he wouldn’t actually try to find articles for papers because there was just no way to do it without spending hours in the library digging through journals trying to find one quote to validate an argument. Now whole volumes of journals from a wide variety of subjects, fields, and specifications are available by selecting the right options in a drop-box. Rather than mourn this bounty of information as the death of the local library, more than ever it’s important to relish in this freedom of information and to trust libraries to provide access to it.

Despite appearances libraries are political institutions, they are often spared the partisan bullshit (though there are some horror stories) and in it’s place is a philosophical politics. As long as a society holds to the idea that everyone deserves the same opportunity to learn and participate then libraries will exist to ensure that a citizenry has access, not only to books, but to the internet, adult education, children books, books clubs, local archives, access to microfiche and local histories, and if nothing else, a space in the community where they may enjoy a few moments of quiet comfort reading a book.

Why our Future depends on Libraries is a speech that is too important not to be read, because our future really does depend on the freedom of information. The way to ensure that the next generation of readers, writers, and citizens contribute to their culture and society is by making sure there is a space that fosters intellectual curiosity and growth. Neil Gaiman growing up had a library that helped him grow as a reader, and because the UK is seeing a dramatic reduction of the number of small libraries, and as the United States drifts more and more towards a reality where libraries are seen as backwards, provincial, and useless the vital question becomes: Why do libraries matter?

Hopefully that question has been answered by now, but Gaiman’s speech offers up the only answer that leaves one satisfied.

Libraries matter because they inspire. Reading a book is a political act, it is a personal act. Once a child recognizes that they can read a book, it’s only a matter of time before they realize that they can write a book. And once that thought is implanted a voice is created which will alter the discourse of a community, or country, in ways that cannot possibly be explained except by the writer who dares to do so.

*Writer’s Note*

If you’re interested in reading the entire speech I managed to find a website which transcribed it and published, it online. I should forewarn the reader that it is an edited version so it may be different than the version published in The View from the Cheap Seats. If you’re interested just follow the link below: